December 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The dispute over whether or not wealthy industrialized nations like the US can agree with fast-developing nations, still in the process of industrialization, like China and India, on how best to formulate global emissions policies to combat climate change has been explained backwards. It is commonly said that China and India want the right to continue burning ever-increasing amounts of carbon-based fuels until they catch up to the US and the industrialized nations in per-capita emissions levels. But the problem is more a matter of what cuts the industrial nations are willing to undertake.
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December 14, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
This video from Congress.org uses animation to illustrate the way “cap and trade” proposals to limit greenhouse gas emissions —and slow or reverse climate change— would work. The video is a simplified explanation of the very complex array of regulatory reforms that will need to be implemented in order to achieve the goals laid out, but it is accurate in its description of the logic of cap and trade.
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December 13, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is fond of calling the entire global field of climate science “a hoax”, and not only advocates inaction to curb the unraveling of climate systems, but devoutly champions the expansion of the very activities that are driving the planet to crisis. Had he been in office during the catastrophic 1930s “Dust Bowl” and had he had any success in convincing government and farmers to apply such an approach, Oklahoma could have been turned into a permanent desert with the characteristics of a failed state in perpetual need of food aid and expensive imports.
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December 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
There has long been a view in Washington that the federal government cannot enact regulations aimed at curbing carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (GHG) without a specific new statutory framework passed by Congress. In an effort to be conciliatory toward pro-business interests and conservatives in both parties, Pres. Obama has largely held to this view of climate-linked emissions regulations. But this view is actually not supported by existing legislation and judicial precedent.
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December 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Soil erosion is just one of the many factors of sustained entropy undermining the global agricultural capacity, and by extension the global food supply. Desertification affecting sub-Saharan Africa, including the expansion of the indomitable Sahara, and across northwestern China, poses a very real threat to cropland feeding hundreds of millions of people. A farm sustainability corps could help deliver resources, know-how and restorative and sustainable soil conservation practices to the most affected areas.
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December 11, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The United Nations Copenhagen Conference on emissions-linked climate destabilization is reported to be progressing toward a new global framework for regulating carbon emissions and mitigating the breakdown of global climate systems. According to the UN website, “The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has noted an eagerness among the parties to the talks to sit down and complete as much work as possible before the arrival of high-level government officials next week.”
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December 10, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The global food supply is facing major security challenges, as warming global average temperatures and the destabilization of climate patterns and natural services undermine dependable agricultural cycles and threaten resources. The food supply is the most direct and visible connection between the breakdown of global climate systems and human health and wellbeing, but not the only link. The possible collapse of a major part of the human food supply means the collapse of agriculture, i.e. the breakdown of the human habitat.
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December 10, 2009 :: Eva Scherson :: Comments Off
Big business interests have come out in fierce opposition to the proposed EPA regulation of emissions that contribute to the greenhouse effect, and the fundamental destabilization of global climate patterns. The opponents of new regulatory measures allege such regulation would unduly hamper the ability of businesses responsible for the emissions to profit from their existing business model. Supporters of heavy investment in carbon-based industries are, without any pretense otherwise, seeking a free pass on harm to human health.
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December 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ruled that carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to human health, two years after the US Supreme Court gave it the authority to regulate carbon emissions for that very reason, under the Clean Air Act. The finding gives new weight to the American administration’s efforts to help achieve international consensus on aggressive emissions reductions at Copenhagen.
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December 7, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
The Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change opened today, with 192 nations in attendance, making it the most significant event ever staged to bring governments together to fashion a global response to climate destabilization. 15,000 participants representing governments and the fields of science, economics and public policy research, are gathered to try to reach agreement on the first true global protocol for curbing emissions and countering the threat of comprehensive climate destabilization.
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December 7, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The e-mails that were stolen from servers at the British University of East Anglia’s climate science center do not show evidence of any conspiracy to falsify science; all they really reveal is evidence of how poorly some people handle political tensions regarding an issue of grave importance for human civilization. So far, the only thing the e-mail scandal has shown is that a handful of people felt that junk science might derail needed environmental regulatory reforms on which the future of human civilization will depend.
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December 1, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
A group of 26 climate scientists, including 14 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN-backed world-leading climate science peer-review institution, are now reporting that climate destabilization is occurring much faster than the IPCC’s landmark reports have so far shown. The Copenhagen Diagnosis report finds that greenhouse gas emissions are expanding rapidly, now 40% higher than in 1990, and that a combination of information regarding solar intensity and carbon emissions increases shows clear evidence that ongoing warming is the result of human industrial activity.
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December 1, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present –day levels, just 20 more years of emissions would give a 25% probability that warming exceeds 2oC. Even with zero emissions after 2030. Every year of delayed action increase the chances of exceeding 2oC warming.
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October 24, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
International efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate destabilization have been hampered by concerns that developing countries will not reduce their emissions aggressively enough, so leaving industrialized nations at a cost-competitive disadvantage. But evidence suggests a failure by developing nations to curb emissions expansion could pose the most significant threat to their political and economic stability.
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October 23, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Even as momentum gathers for major collaborative climate-linked emissions regulatory policy, aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions like carbon dioxide (CO2), some in industry remain convinced of an outdated theory that assumes emissions reduction must be bad for business. The US Chamber of Commerce (CC), a leading business lobby, is devoting $150 million to fight regulation [...]
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October 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Insurers campaign to kill healthcare may be helping renew support for the public option, as Congress prepares to vote. A shift in subsidies is driving a clean energy boom in the American west, and emissions legislation is likely to pass Congress this year. Financial regulatory reform will establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Immigration and gay-rights reform will likely wait till 2010.
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October 16, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
President Barack Obama was in New Orleans yesterday to survey Katrina recovery efforts 4 years after the hurricane ravaged the city, expelling most of its population. Obama toured the only school reopened to date in the Lower Ninth Ward, the area mist devastated by Katrina’s storm surge, and met with Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, a persistent critic of key Obama policies, discussing the best ways to ensure effective delivery of assistance to the ongoing rebuilding efforts.
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October 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.
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September 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The field of ecological research and reporting is a part of the basic human urge to engage the world through reason and a quest for understanding. It is not about seizing control of society’s urges and services and limiting the freedom of anyone, but rather about making sure we have the information we need to make the best choices, then advocating for those choices, when inertia and custom stand in the way of better health — for individuals and in the manner in which human individuals respond to their social and natural environments.
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September 22, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
Pres. Barack Obama today delivered his first address to the UN General Assembly, promoting cooperation to green the global economy and combat climate change. He pledged the US would lead by example, and called on other nations to find common ground and work to secure the global environment against irreversible degradation.
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September 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
One solution for California would be the expansion of its efforts across the region and the nation, to spur the creation of a full-scale renewable resource-based power grid, to optimize both generative capacity and distribution. The question is, now that the decision has been made to shift toward renewables, how can California go beyond the 1/3 threshold and build a strong renewable-energy export economy?
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September 15, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) is reported to be planning to enact the most stringent renewable energy regulations in the nation, requiring public utilities to generate fully one-third of their electric output from renewable resources by the year 2020. California has been pushing for aggressive new standards requiring a transition to renewable energy, but was blocked by the Bush-era EPA from implementing more stringent state-wide emissions protocols and has recently seen a tough battle in Sacramento over the question of imposing on utilities a shift to clean, renewable resources.
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September 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
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September 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The security of the global food supply is deteriorating rapidly, due to a convergence of forces all related to long-gathering crisis-level erosions of the human agricultural prospect. Desertification, water scarcity, massive toxic runoff and oceanic wildlife collapse, are all putting the global food web under unprecedented stress.
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July 10, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
US president Barack Obama convened a G8-parallel Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, comprised of 17 nations representing over 80% of the world’s industrial and consumer greenhouse gas emissions. The goal was to push governments to move their emissions and energy strategies closer to consensus for meeting bold targets for carbon emissions reductions, in anticipation of the September G20 summit in Pittsburgh and the UN climate summit at Copenhagen in December.
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July 8, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
The Hot Spring Network has opened a discussion, in collaboration with Café Sentido, on the need to diversify the global wheat crop in order to prevent an evolved crop fungus, Ug99, from destroying as much as 80% of the global wheat harvest.
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July 2, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 7 Comments
While some industry allies claim that HR 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) will raise costs for energy-producers and thereby raise energy costs across the board, there are signs that technologies already being tested and implemented could benefit in such a way as to bring about a complete, economy-wide revolution in energy production, distribution and pricing. Renewable resources are now showing themselves to be far more efficient than ever previously thought, and bold initiatives are getting ready to test new limits that would allow even airplanes to be 100% fuel-free.
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June 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The US is considering a climate and energy bill, H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), amid much controversy over competing methods of calculating costs and benefits. Climate skeptics that rule out global climate change as a real long-term cost are concerned that energy-industry economics will be “distorted” by this legislation, leading to massive losses across the economy; environmentalists are concerned that widespread rapid climatic variation could destabilize not only natural ecosystems and reliable agriculture, but political institutions, borders and nation states.
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June 27, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
One of the main objections made by those who criticize efforts to control carbon emissions is that “carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant”. This line of reasoning tends to argue that emissions-induced global climate destabilization is an elaborate anti-corporate hoax aimed at creating a one-world socialist government. The problem is that this line of reasoning conveniently, or unknowingly, ignores altogether the crises that emerge not from essential contaminants but from substances crossing a threshold, a tipping point.
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June 26, 2009 :: staff :: 2 Comments
Congressman Henry Waxman, one of the main sponsors of the “ACES” climate bill, H.R. 2454, has added the Titus-Giffords-Heinrich amendment, which would require the federal government to steadily ramp up contracted clean energy agreements over the next 20 years. The clean energy amendment had been pushed by a number environmental and progressive advocacy groups, including MoveOn.org, which urged millions of supporters to contact Congress to demand inclusion of the amendment.
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June 24, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Major new climate legislation is pending before the United States Congress. The bill has been called the most important climate-related legislation ever to be voted on by the US House of Representatives, and has been the cause of intense policy negotiations among supporters, opponents and legislators. The League of Conservation Voters has taken the decision that it will not endorse any member of the House of Representatives that does not support the legislation.
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June 23, 2009 :: staff :: 2 Comments
A crop-borne fungus that targets wheat, named Ug99 because it was first identified in Uganda in 1999, has become one of the primary threats to global food security. Newfound virulence in the evolving stem-rust strain suggests the fungus could destroy as much as 80% of the world’s most widely grown crop: wheat.
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June 22, 2009 :: staff :: 3 Comments
In what is described as “the strongest language” ever to emerge from the White House on climate change, a new 190-page report warns that climate destabilization is happening now, around the world, and beginning to impact every level of the economy and of living standards.
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June 18, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
There are still skeptics who say that wind power cannot generate enough power to be useful, or that the transition to renewable sources of energy is not really of urgent necessity. Here I offer some ideas to counter that argument. First of all, the US is shamefully behind in developing wind power generation, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen, as some suggest.
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June 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Overfishing has depleted fish-stocks the world over. Subsidies and lack of enforcement of sustainability measures drive the fishing industry to deplete the very stocks on which its existence depends, while climate interference and global contamination are leaving oceans so hypoxic (oxygen deprived) they cannot support marine life. At least 405 such ‘dead zones’ have been identified across the globe.
More on page 2955
May 20, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
The United States Congress yesterday approved new legislation putting restrictions on credit card companies, limiting the leeway banks have in specifying terms and conditions in complex wording in long pages of fine print. The measure would also require that no lender see interest rates escalate until being at least 60 days delinquent and that rates [...]
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May 18, 2009 :: staff :: 2 Comments
Today’s New York Times features an above-the-fold front-page story on the apparent probability that Congress will reach agreement on using a “cap and trade” approach to curbing carbon emissions. The massive industrial output of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been found to contribute to the destabilization of the global climate and a gradual warming effect which could lead to catastrophic risks to infrastructure and public health.
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May 2, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
Community opposition, legal challenges, and financial uncertainty over future carbon costs are prompting companies to rethink their plans for coal. Since the beginning of 2007, 95 proposed coal-fired power plants have been cancelled or postponed in the United States—59 in 2007, 24 in 2008, and at least 12 in the first three months of 2009. This covers nearly half of the 200 or so U.S. coal-fired power plants that have been proposed for construction since 2000. The vast majority of the remaining proposals are essentially on hold, awaiting word on whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is going to impose limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. With further legal challenges ahead and the regulation of CO2 imminent, 2009 may very well witness the end of new coal-fired power plants in the United States.
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May 1, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The US Commerce Department secretary Gary Locke has extended the salmon fishery disaster declaration for California and Oregon for a second year. The disaster declaration allows the Commerce Dept. to send emergency funds to the communities most severely impacted from the collapse of local fisheries.
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April 25, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Former US vice president Al Gore testified Friday in Congressional hearings on the subject of global climate destabilization. The hearings were linked to new legislation being considered that would establish regulatory measures that seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Gore said the legislation would serve to protect the environment, as well as national security, and urged unity in the interests of the country and the world.
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April 22, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Redford notes that it is young people who will inherit the world we are making and their views, their concern about whether it will be stable and livable in their prime, is vital for planning now in a conscious and ethical way.
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April 17, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will regulate greenhouse gas emissions, after a comprehensive policy review shows real dangers posed to human health and wellbeing by the effects of accumulating greenhouse gases. The Clean Air Act will, for the first time, be applied as the basis for instituting national regulations on carbon emissions and other gases that could contribute to climate destabilization.
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March 3, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Pres. Barack Obama today visited the Interior Dept., noting it was once called in jest “the Department of Everything Else”, a government agency with responsibility for nearly 1/5 of the entire land area of the United States. He professed his intention to task the Interior Dept. with taking major steps to help build green infrastructure for an energy economy based on solar-voltaic and wind-turbine-generated energy.
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February 25, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Bobby Jindal’s official Republican response to Barack Obama’s address last night was nothing short of a startling, clumsy, shameful attempt to hijack the ideas and the achievements of Barack Obama. One by one, he listed priorities his party has neglected or fought against for decades, each of which Obama not only talks about, but has been implementing, as if the Louisiana governor believed there were any credible way for Americans to take his spiel seriously.
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January 26, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Pres. Barack Obama today addressed a room full of invited guests from the business community, to outline his position as to economic stimulus, energy innovation, climate destabilization and dependence on high-polluting combustible fuels. The president then signed more executive orders raising fuel-efficiency standards and ordering a review of the EPA’s barring California from raising tailpipe carbon-emissions standards. Striking a defiant tone, Obama declared that “America will not be held hostage to dwindling resources, hostile regimes and a warming planet”.
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January 6, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.
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December 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
A long-running bellwether legal case in Canada’s farming industry, which has left at least one farmer unable to farm any crop variety of rapeseed (canola) —for fear of having to pay accidental royalties to bio-chemical giant Monsanto—, highlights the need for comprehensive reform of international seed regulation standards. The Canadian courts ruled that the individual farmer had to shoulder the burden of ferreting out any instance of “contamination” of his crop by pollen from nearby genetically-modified (GM) planting, as Monsanto held a patent on the seeds. The farmer, and those who support his claims, argue that there is no means by which anyone can prevent cross-pollination from GM plants.
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December 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The climate change conference currently underway in Poznan, Poland, seeks to build on the Bali agreement, adopted by 180 countries in 2007, in hopes of achieving a global emissions regime. A sweeping economic downturn overtaking North America and Europe, and now hitting China’s manufacturing and export base, it is feared, will hamper efforts to implement comprehensive green industrial and economic reforms.
More on page 838
November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
More on page 798
November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The issue is not, as so many would like to believe, whether carbon-based fuels are affordable to the end-user. They are not. The total costs per gallon of gasoline are estimated at more than $11, covered by government subsidies, public-private research funding, tax incentives, military spending, public health funding, and funds devoted to cleaning up the ill effects of pollution. Capitalist markets need not be dependent on unsustainable excesses in resource use, but we are in the current global economic crunch, because they have been.
More on page 797
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